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DENVER — The magnitude of the moment hit Theresa Reinhart when her son Max led the Calgary Flames out onto the ice Saturday night at Rogers Arena.

Her boy’s first NHL game. On Hockey Night in Canada. In his hometown, against the mighty Vancouver Canucks.

Talk about real life following a fairy-tale script.

“I just don’t want to see him get hurt,” Theresa was saying in the second intermission of a 5-2 Calgary loss to the Canucks. “It’s hard for me. I see him as a two-year-old as opposed to a grown man. I just think these guys look mean hitting my baby.

“But he’s a smart kid.”

Smart much like his father Paul, who patrolled the blueline for 11 years as a Flame and Canuck before going on to a successful career as a stock market promoter and financier based in West Vancouver.

“I like watching this more than I liked watching his dad,” Theresa admitted, with her husband in earshot. “It’s more exciting. It’s great.”

All grown up, Max Reinhart, 21, received word of his promotion to the big club Friday night after the Abbotsford Heat fell 4-1 to the Grand Rapids Rampage in American Hockey League action.

From there, he drove about an hour west to hook up with the Flames at their posh hotel in downtown Vancouver.

“I’ve dreamed about playing in this building pretty much my whole life,” he said before puck drop Saturday. “Two teams my father played for.

“I got the call, I couldn’t have been more excited. It hasn’t really hit me yet. I’m still just really excited to be in this situation.”

Reinhart is blessed with quite the poker face, so his inner excitement failed to crack the surface when Mark Donnelly belted out O Canada before a television audience from coast to coast.

Most players chop from side to side, some ever so slightly, during the national anthems. Visualizing the task at hand, Reinhart looked like a statue frozen to his spot on the blueline.

“I kind of wish I had another chance to take it all in,” he said after the fact with a wide grin. “But I was trying to focus on the game and not get too distracted.”

A third-round pick (64th overall) in 2010 NHL Entry Draft, Reinhart impressed his superiors in his NHL debut — although his first shift will go down as memorable for the wrong reasons.

Thirty-four seconds after the opening faceoff, Calgary defenceman Mark Giordano got caught on a bad pinch, and Dan Hamhuis converted on a two-on-one to give the Canucks a lead they would never relinquish.

“Definitely a high to a low,” Max said. “Obviously, not the way you want to start, but that kind of stuff happens in hockey. You just have to shake it off and go out and forget that it happened.”

One thing he’ll never forget that happened: a marathon shift as the second period wound down where Reinhart received a free education from two Vancouver icons: Henrik and Daniel Sedin.

“When they throw it through your legs out there, it’s not a lot of fun,” Max said. “But that’s part of what I expected coming up here. I’m definitely learning as I go along.

“I’m hoping to get another shot.”

By the end of the night, Reinhart registered thee shots, one hit and one take-away in 16:08 of ice-time on the win to earn himself another shot Monday in Colorado.

“We want grit in this organization, and he went to the dirty areas,” head coach Bob Hartley said. “He fought in the corners. He was great behind the net.

“For his first game, I was really happy.”

So too was dad Paul, who can look forward to similar debuts for middle son Griffin (a fourth overall pick of the New York Islanders in 2012) and baby Sam (a Kootenay Ice forward projected to go as high as first overall in 2014).

“You know the boys have played a lot of hockey,” he said. “But at the end of the day, this is where they want to be in the National Hockey League. So all their experiences lead to the National Hockey League.

“To have the first of hopefully many come to fruition, It’s a big day.”

The major objective for Max, on his big day? To prove, at spindly six-foot-one 180 pounds, he has the bulk necessary to stick in the NHL.

So far, so good.

“I definitely tried to show them I’m big enough to play here,” he said. “And that was obviously one of the things I was trying to work on today.

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